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Fantasia in F minor, K608

Introduction

This is a wonderfully intricate piece of music, written for an amazingly complex piece of machinery. Until the beginnings of the industrial revolution the most complicated machine devised by man was the organ, closely followed by clock-type mechanisms. In Mozart’s time one Count Joseph Deym was an enthusiast for ‘mechanical clocks’, clockwork devices which caused pipe organs to play. He set up an exhibition presenting tableaux after the manner of waxworks displays, which made use of these instruments from among his collection of automata.

Mozart’s F minor piece for Deym did not gain the title ‘Fantasia’ until it was arranged for piano duet during the last century. However, it is a totally appropriate name for a piece which is even more fantastic than the machine for which it was created. It begins, rather as Handel’s Messiah opens, with a serious overture in French style, then there is an Andante worthy of the finest string quartet before the serious overture returns. Both parts of the overture explore the device of fugue—a reminder that Mozart had studied the music of Bach. Mozart’s technique and invention in this medium rival the mathematical precision which created the interlocking gears of the mechanism for which the Fantasia was written.